How to Create Power BI Visual Reports with Real-Time Certinia Data

CData Power BI Connectors provide self-service integration with Microsoft Power BI. The CData Power BI Connector for Certinia links your Power BI reports to real-time Certinia data. You can monitor Certinia data through dashboards and ensure that your analysis reflects Certinia data in real time by scheduling refreshes or refreshing on demand. This article details how to use the Power BI Connector to create real-time visualizations of Certinia data in Microsoft Power BI Desktop.

If you are interested in publishing reports on Certinia data to PowerBI.com, refer to our other Knowledge Base article.

Collaborative Query Processing

The CData Power BI Connectors offer unmatched performance for interacting with live Certinia data in Power BI due to optimized data processing built into the connector. When you issue complex SQL queries from Power BI to Certinia, the connector pushes supported SQL operations, like filters and aggregations, directly to Certinia and utilizes the embedded SQL Engine to process unsupported operations (often SQL functions and JOIN operations) client-side. With built-in dynamic metadata querying, you can visualize and analyze Certinia data using native Power BI data types.

Connect to Certinia as a Power BI Data Source

Installing the Power BI Connector creates a DSN (data source name) called CData Power BI Certinia. This the name of the DSN that Power BI uses to request a connection to the data source. Configure the DSN by filling in the required connection properties.

You can use the Microsoft ODBC Data Source Administrator to create and configure the DSN: From the Start menu, enter "ODBC Data Sources" and select the CData PowerBI REST DSN. Ensure that you run the version of the ODBC Administrator that corresponds to the bitness of your Power BI Desktop installation (32-bit or 64-bit). You can also use run the ConfigureODBC.exe tool located in the installation folder for the connector.

There are several authentication methods available for connecting to Certinia: login credentials, SSO, and OAuth.

Authenticating with a Login and Token

Set the User and Password to your login credentials. Additionally, set the SecurityToken. By default, the SecurityToken is required, but you can make it optional by allowing a range of trusted IP addresses.

To disable the security token:

1. Log in to Certinia and enter "Network Access" in the Quick Find box in the setup section.
2. Add your IP address to the list of trusted IP addresses.

To obtain the security token:

1. Open the personal information page on certinia.com.
2. Click the link to reset your security token. The token will be emailed to you.
3. Specify the security token in the SecurityToken connection property or append it to the Password.

Authenticating with OAuth

If you do not have access to the user name and password or do not want to require them, use the OAuth user consent flow. See the OAuth section in the Help for an authentication guide.

Connecting to Certinia Sandbox Accounts

Set UseSandbox to true (false by default) to use a Certinia sandbox account. Ensure that you specify a sandbox user name in User.

How to Query Certinia Tables

Follow the steps below to build a query to pull Certinia data into the report:

1. Open Power BI Desktop and click Get Data -> Other -> CData Certinia.
2. Select CData PowerBI Certinia in the Data Source Name menu and select a data connectivity mode:
   Select Import if you want to import a copy of the data into your project. You can refresh this data on demand.
   Select DirectQuery if you want to work with the remote data.
3. Select tables in the Navigator dialog.

4. In the Query Editor, you can customize your dataset by filtering, sorting, and summarizing Certinia columns. Click Edit to open the query editor. Right-click a row to filter the rows. Right-click a column header to perform actions like the following:

   • Change column data types
   • Remove a column
   • Group by columns

   Power BI detects each column's data type from the Certinia metadata retrieved by the connector.

   Power BI records your modifications to the query in the Applied Steps section, adjusting the underlying data retrieval query that is executed to the remote Certinia data. When you click Close and Apply, Power BI executes the data retrieval query.

   Otherwise, click Load to pull the data into Power BI.

How to Create Data Visualizations in Power BI

After pulling the data into Power BI, you can create data visualizations in the Report view by dragging fields from the Fields pane onto the canvas. Follow the steps below to create a pie chart:

1. Select the pie chart icon in the Visualizations pane.
2. Select a dimension in the Fields pane: for example, BillingState.
3. Select a measure in the Fields pane: for example, Name.

You can change sort options by clicking the ellipsis (...) button for the chart. Options to select the sort column and change the sort order are displayed.

You can use both highlighting and filtering to focus on data. Filtering removes unfocused data from visualizations; highlighting dims unfocused data. You can highlight fields by clicking them:

You can apply filters at the page level, at the report level, or to a single visualization by dragging fields onto the Filters pane. To filter on the field's value, select one of the values that are displayed in the Filters pane.

Click Refresh to synchronize your report with any changes to the data.

At this point, you will have a Power BI report built on top of live Certinia data. Learn more about the CData Power BI Connectors for Certinia and download a free trial from the CData Power BI Connector for Certinia page. Let our Support Team know if you have any questions.